The title of Haruki Murakami’s new three-volume novel points to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Japanese word for “nine” is pronounced like “Q”, so 1Q84 can be read as “one-nine-eight-four”. But the book feels more like Alice in Wonderland.
This being Murakami, the Alice character is not a Victorian English girl. Rather she is a 30-year-old Japanese physical instructor, with a penchant for one-night stands and a sideline in ice-pick assassinations. Like Alice, Aomame enters a parallel world by accident. Instead of falling down a rabbit hole, she climbs into 1Q84 down an emergency stairway leading off a Tokyo flyover.
At one point she says to herself in Alice-like monologue, her thoughts helpfully spelt out in italics: “It doesn’t make any sense. I could try to explain it until I went hoarse and nobody would ever believe me ... But remember – this is the year 1Q84. A strange world where anything can happen.”